


since i've laid my burdens down

by Pthithia



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kinda, M/M, Mild Blood, Nightmares, Not A Fix-It, References to Canon, Sad Ending, Vomiting, sorry folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 11:09:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21319207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pthithia/pseuds/Pthithia
Summary: He’s crammed into a metal canister hurtling through the air thousands of miles up, at the speed of light, taking him someplace he knows he does not want to be. Richie can’t explain what it is that’s calling him. Loyalty, maybe. Love, definitely. Something else, too.But if loyalty and love are enough to convince Richie to board this deathtrap and fly across the country, then he isn’t sure he wants to feel them anymore. They’ve caused enough pain as it is already.(Richie visits some old ghosts.)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	since i've laid my burdens down

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to the dorky kid in coke bottle glasses. There’s something to be said for processing your grief through fiction, friends, but fair warning that this is not a happy fic. Warnings in the tags.

Richie stops in Atlanta first, because it's on the way to New York, and he thinks if he practices having his heart broken now, maybe it won’t be as bad when he finally gets to Manhattan.

The entire trip is agony and phone calls, one after the other, first from his agent pestering him for an update on the stuff Richie is supposed to be pitching in two weeks, and then from Beverly, probably wanting to know what he’s doing that day. He lets them all go to voicemail.

Honestly, he hadn’t even thought of telling any of the others what he was doing. It had just never crossed his mind, from the moment he rolled over on the umpteeth sleepless night and picked up his phone to start booking flights, before he could lose his nerve. He doesn’t have much of that to go around these days.

But now he’s crammed into a metal canister hurtling through the air thousands of miles up, at the speed of light, taking him someplace he knows he does not want to be. Richie can’t explain what it is that’s calling him. Loyalty, maybe. Love, definitely. Something else, too.

But if loyalty and love are enough to convince Richie to board this deathtrap and fly across the country, then he isn’t sure he wants to feel them anymore. They’ve caused enough pain as it is already. He hunches over in his tiny seat and squeezes his eyes shut, gently holding a folded piece of paper in one hand, the other bunched up in the front of his hoodie, thumb stroking the soft fabric.

Atlanta is hot. They land, and Richie gets off the plane and schleps his duffel bag down to the car rental place. Theoretically, he knows that it’s warm in the south, and that at the end of summer it will be even warmer, but it’s not the dry California warmth he’s used to. It’s muggy, oppressive heat.

He sits in the car for a good five minutes, staring at the dashboard, thinking about what an awful, terrible idea this was, before he turns the key in the ignition and mutters _don’t be such a bitch._

He scrolls through some stilted, overly polite emails on his phone before he finds the address, sent to him a few days before, when Richie was still absolutely sure of himself. Now, he plugs it into maps and glances at the directions, carefully pulling out of the parking lot and starting down the road.

The odd confederate flag is jarring to see as he makes his way through the city._ Doesn’t matter,_ he thinks to himself. _Not why you’re here._

As he drives, he wonders what he’s going to say. What he can possibly say. Because there’s nothing, and this offer was generous enough, considering she’s never met him before. Richie thinks about it, and then he thinks that nothing anyone has said to him has made any difference, been any comfort, and so how can he hope to deliver the same?

He won’t, he decides. He won’t say anything.

It’s not a very long drive, maybe 30 minutes, but that’s still enough to make Richie change his mind three times, and when he pulls down the street lined with huge willows and pretty houses, he begins to panic, because he still has nothing to say. He stops in front of a house toward the end of the block. It’s pretty, two stories, red brick and moss green siding, and a dark green front door. Like a house from a fairy tale.

The panic is mounting, mounting as he turns the car off and steps out onto the sidewalk, palms sweaty, breath sticking in his throat. What is he going to say? What is he going to do? Why is he even here?

He presses down on the doorbell and hears it ring faintly inside. Richie looks down and shuffles his feet on the stone porch. He must look like a wreck.

It’s a few seconds before the door opens, and a woman his age fills the narrow crack in the doorway. She’s blonde, and wears glasses, and her face is kind, but she doesn’t smile. She looks worn.

The woman says _Richie Tozier?_ And Richie says _yeah, that’s me,_ and then she pulls the door back and says _please, come in._

The house is just as pretty and neat on the inside as it was on the outside. A cozy, tidy entryway with a staircase, leading to a huge family room and kitchen. Exact. Clean. Patricia Uris clears her throat, and thanks him for coming and for the kind letter he’d sent.

It’s kind of awful. She brings Richie into the family room, and there are huge bookshelves lining the walls, meticulously organized, color and title. The pillows on the couch are neatly arranged, candles on the mantel above the fireplace perfectly symmetrical. The photographs on the walls hang exactly up and down, and one shows a tall man with curly hair, smiling and holding Patty close. It was warm and sunny, wherever that picture was taken.

Patty asks how he’s been, and Richie lies and says he’s been fine, and Richie asks her how she’s doing, and he’d be willing to bet anything that she lies too when she says_ as well as I can._

Richie doesn’t know how to be. To be serious, to be sincere. He might have been able to joke, to laugh, to make light of the situation, if he were anywhere else, or with anyone else. But it’s been so long since Richie could really joke about anything. There’s a blockage in his mind (_and in his heart,_ some part of him says), and he just can’t, but when he can’t do that and he can’t be serious then there isn’t much left to give.

Patty sits beside him on the couch, and neither of them touch the tea she serves. There’s a table against the far wall with a puzzle on it. Even with the few pieces missing, Richie can see it’s a picture of birds, brilliantly colored birds. He feels nauseous.

They sit in silence for a while, and then Patty sets her cup down on the coffee table and asks Richie what Stan was like as a little boy.

Richie blinks at her, and then awkwardly sets his own cup down, careful to use a coaster, because he can imagine the look on Stan’s face if he left a mark on the pretty glass table.

Stan.

Richie shifts on the couch, and his eyes land on a picture of Stan and Patty on their wedding day, and then he starts talking.

He talks about the little boy with curly hair, and how Stan’s hair was very light when he was little, the way he’d carefully arrange it every morning around his kippah, neat polo shirts tucked into his slacks. He tells her how Stan gleefully dumped the contents of his backpack into the trash bin at the end of the school year, and the bird bible he carried under his arms at all times.

He talks about how Stan would go out with his book and his journal and a pair of binoculars and wait patiently for hours for the birds to show up, and how Stan could never write down a bird he hadn’t “caught” in his journal, and they way they would poke fun and call him Bird Boy and a host of other names, and they way Stan would roll his eyes when someone was being irritating, and how he and Eddie would argue over which alleys in Derry were the most dirty, and how they were the only two people who trusted each other completely when it came to keeping things clean and neat.

The memories pour out of Richie, faster and faster until he feels like he can’t keep up with the rate they’re coming back. His voice is strangely flat, blank, and Richie thinks he should be feeling something, feeling joy or sorrow or even embarrassment at telling such memories to a virtual stranger, but he just doesn’t. Twenty seven years worth of lost memories.

Patty sits in silence, listening with rapt attention, eyes wide, and there is a desperate, hungry way in which she leans into the memories, the things Richie says, and so he doesn’t stop.

Richie tells her about him and Stan and Mike going down to the barrens to birdwatch together, and how Richie made loud jokes and complained about being bored while Stan pointed birds out in his book and in the sky to Mike, who leaned in and watched with some apprehension, because he was a little afraid of birds but Stan loved them so much he wanted to learn.

He gets lost in memory, half baked things he had no recollection of until that moment, like how Stan would always, without fail, prop the kickstand of his bike up, because he couldn’t bear to let the paint get scratched on it, or how Stan balanced Richie on his shoulders in the deep water at the quarry so that they could play chicken fight against Beverly and Bill; the way Stan would sit stiff and straight when they were at worship, always a couple rows ahead of Richie because that way Richie couldn’t make faces at him and try to get him to laugh while Rabbi Uris was speaking.

Richie stops speaking for a moment, and it’s just him and Patty in a too-quiet, too-big house, breathing in the same death.

Richie tells her about the underground clubhouse Ben built for them, and the dirt walls and shaky support beams, and how sometimes loose dirt would rain from above. He tells her that Stan went down to the drugstore the very first day Ben brought them down there, and the next day he presented them with a coffee can full of floral showercaps he’d bought with his own allowance, one for each of them. _So you don’t get spiders stuck in your hair when you’re down here,_ Stan had said, with just the slightest smile on his face, and Richie had balled up his designated cap covered in blue flowers and thrown it back at Stan.

Patty nudges his forearm with a box of tissues, and, startled, Richie takes one. He hadn’t even realized he was crying until that point, because it doesn’t feel like crying. There is no tight throat, and he doesn’t feel his face getting warm, or hot tears on his cheeks, but when he wipes his eyes the tissue comes away damp, and so he must be crying.

He gets a grip while Patty clears away their cups, and thinks to himself that Patty is the widow, and she’s the one who should be crying, but Richie gets the sense that she’s made out of strong stuff. Richie wishes he had a picture or something to show her, something to give her other than almost thirty year old memories of the ghost of a boy who doesn’t exist anymore.

When she sits next to him again, he smiles at her, and she smiles back, but they’re small, tight smiles. She looks at her hands and fiddles with her wedding ring, delicate and beautiful. Richie would expect nothing less.

It’s his turn then, to ask about Stan, what he was like as an adult, and Patty’s turn to look surprised and glance at the photographs on the wall, before she begins talking.

She tells Richie about meeting Stan, and the shy way he’d spoken to her, enchanted her. She tells Richie about a date in their college days where a girl Patty had known in high school ran into them, and how the date ended with Stan dumping a beer on the girl in the movie theater from his balcony seat, before grabbing Patty and running, the two of them out of breath from laughter.

She talks about how Stan had to go through every house they looked at in Atlanta and rate each for safety and functionality, and how the house they were in had only scored a 78 out of 100 for him initially, but he fell in love with the sunroom at the back of the house. She says that the sunroom eventually became a room where he watched his birds and she sewed, and Stan would read and wait for something to come to the birdbath directly in front of the huge glass windows.

Richie realizes that he is leaning in too, hypnotized, almost, by the picture Patty paints of the Stan from Now, as opposed to Stan from Then. He listens carefully, as if committing every word to memory, trying to fit the man with dark curly hair and dorky reading glasses into the mold of the little boy from Richie’s childhood.

Patty tells him how Stan went through and meticulously organized each book on the shelves against the wall according to his own method, and how she had teased him for ignoring every known rule of cataloguing. How Stan liked to surprise her, with flowers, or with trips, or with home cooked dinners, and how he loved to hear her talk about her classes. How much Stan loved his job, loved the business, how hard he had worked to get it where it was and the earnest, excited way he’d said, when they were first engaged,_ I know I can do it, this is just the beginning,_ and how her father had begrudgingly agreed years later that maybe Stan was worth something, after all.

They sit in the room with death, and Richie realizes that he’s still watching her, waiting for more, as if both of them have been desperately searching for some trace of familiarity in the stories they weave of their Stan, both Stans, some trace of familiarity in each other.

But there isn’t any.

Patty lets him go into Stan’s office, and Richie looks at the bookcases and bulletin boards and charts and family pictures, things Stan loved, that he put time and energy into.

Richie rests his hand on the desk, where there’s a picture of Patty and Mr. and Mrs. Uris on one side, and on the other, a stack of dry-looking ornithology books whose spines have never been cracked open. A soft gray cardigan is draped over the back of the desk chair, and when Richie runs his hand over it, she gently tells him he can have it, if he wants.

And Richie does want, wants a part of Stan like the white hoodie he’s wearing now, and he feels guilty coming to this house and taking a part away from it, but Patty nods at him and Richie takes the cardigan and folds it over his arm.

It’s only when Richie follows Patty back out into the hallway, and he’s standing at the head of the stairs, that he can see a door slightly ajar across from them, the tile floor obviously belonging to a bathroom, and Riche suddenly feels so sick he thinks he might vomit right then, in the middle of the Uris’s hall.

Patty doesn’t notice, or pretends not to, and quietly they both go back downstairs.

Patty is a nice woman, and Richie thinks he might have been able to joke with her were this any other circumstance, but for the time being he can’t wait to get the fuck out of this house. Too many ghosts lurking the corners, too many knives hiding just below the surface.

He wonders, then, about Patty being alone in the house, the quiet house where her husband died only a month or so earlier, and he begins to awkwardly ask, but before he can finish she says that a friend is coming to stay the night, and will be there soon, and Richie knows that she can’t wait for him to be gone, either.

Maybe they could have been friends. Maybe Richie could have said something to make her laugh and brought up some stupid anecdote from his childhood, and Patty would have asked him to stay just a little longer.

But now, he needs more than anything to be gone.

She walks with him to the door, and catches his hand lightly. _Call soon? Or write?_

He smiles, and she smiles, and he says _yeah, of course,_ and then he’s walking down the brick stairs and across the neat front lawn to his car, parked on the edge of the curb.

He gets in and gently places the cardigan on the passenger seat, and when he looks back at the house the door is closed and the curtains drawn.

The drive to New York is a long one, but Richie doesn’t feel particularly tired, or hungry, or bored. At least there’s something to do when he’s driving, and if he blasts shitty radio loud enough, he doesn’t have to be alone with his thoughts.

When he stops for gas in North Carolina, he pulls the cardigan on over the white hoodie. It smells like cologne, a clean, slightly floral cologne, and Richie hunches over the steering wheel and buries his face in the soft fabric.

Beverly calls again when he gets near DC, and then Bill calls, and Richie figures he should stop and answer someone before they all start to panic.

He sends a quick text to the group _(On the road right now. I’m fine, will explain later. Love you all.),_ and then decides to pull into a hotel for the night, picking the first crummy one he finds and taking the stairs two at a time up to his room.

He sits on the hideous bedspread and looks around the room, and thinks how much Stan and Eddie would hate this dirty motel, and he wonders what Patty is doing now. He wonders if her friend is there, and what they’re talking about.

It’s another restless night. Richie has a dream about Eddie, only it’s Eddie as a little boy, all big brown eyes and skinny limbs, and Eddie is having an asthma attack, choking, gasping for air, and Stan is there too, only instead of a kippah he has a giant spider on his head, and Stan is screaming for help and Richie is trying to save Eddie, but his coughing gets worse and then suddenly he’s vomiting, thick black goo that splatters across Richie’s chest, only it isn’t black, it’s horribly red and warm, fresh, like blood-

Richie wakes up when he hits the floor, and, although he was just asleep, he feels incredibly alert, aware.

He can hear his breath, loud and whistling as he tries to stop hyperventilating, and he hugs his knees to his chest and sits on the floor, trying to get the thought of blood, the thought of spiders, out of his head.

He can’t.

Richie ends up standing numbly under the running shower head for five minutes, and then he dresses, gets his things, and leaves. It’s three in the morning, but as long as he’s driving he doesn’t have to think.

New York City is a shitshow. Richie’s always thought so, ever since he lived there for ten years, starting out doing awful comedy routines before writing for Saturday Night Live, and, when he got an agent and some level of public interest, eventually starring on the show for a few years. It was fun while it was happening, but then his popularity was increasing, and when his agent and managers told him he could do even better in LA, Richie had agreed and kissed New York goodbye. Now, driving through the crowded and traffic-clogged streets, navigating his way across the city, Richie remembers just how dirty the city is, how cramped, how chaotic.

It takes him a while to find his way to where he’s going, and it’s mid afternoon by the time he pulls to a stop outside a row of quiet and upscale townhouses.

This address would have been a bitch to find if Richie hadn’t stolen those fucking suitcases. He felt a twinge of guilt about it at the time, but now he can only feel a grim satisfaction. He rubs the fabric of the hoodie together between his thumb and forefinger, gently toying with the strings, before he gets the nerve to put the car in park and step out onto the narrow street.

He’s not expected, and Richie doesn’t anticipate this will go well, but from the moment he entered New York, he’s only felt numb. No sorrow, no joy, not even fear, being this far east again. Just empty.

He rings the doorbell, and this one is a loud, angry buzz. Nobody answers, and Richie can’t see a car in the driveway. He sighs and resigns himself to leaving after a few minutes, when suddenly the curtains in the front window shift, and he can see someone looking out at him.

A moment later, the door opens, and Richie almost gasps.

Because Sonia Kaspbrak is on the other side, only younger, and blonde, and Richie knows that she might call herself _Myra Kaspbrak,_ but that doesn’t make her any different. _Yes, can I help you?_ she asks, and Richie clears his throat and says _yes, my name is Richie Tozier. I’m a friend of your husband’s,_ and Myra glares down at him and says _Eddie isn’t here. What do you want?_

And Richie is reminded of all those times he stood on the Kaspbraks’ front steps in Derry, asking if Eddie could come play, only to be told by Mrs. K that _Eddie’s sick_ and _why don’t you leave him alone, he doesn’t want to see you_ and _boys like you are the reason this town is so horrible,_ and then the door would slam in his face and he could hear Eddie inside, begging his mother to let him go out.

Richie and Eddie never talked about that. It happened a lot, so that Eddie eventually began sneaking out of his house to come to Richie’s, where they would only be met with a puzzled smile and a plate of cookies from Maggie Tozier. But they never talked about the things Sonia Kaspbrak said to Richie’s face, or the things he was sure she said about him when he wasn’t there.

Richie looks at Myra, and thinks of Sonia, and realizes that he doesn’t exactly have a game plan here. Running on autopilot, he asks _do you know where he is?_ and Myra huffs and says _he left a month ago and I haven’t heard from him since. But he’ll be back. He always comes back,_ and Richie doesn’t even want to know what that means.

And then Myra narrows her eyes and says _you’re that comedian, aren’t you? Tozier?_ And Richie says _yes,_ and Myra says _wait here_ and disappears into the house.

So. This is Eddie’s house.

From where the door is slightly open, Richie can see a staircase and coat rack. There’s a blazer still hanging from one of the hooks, and Richie can see a pair of men’s shoes neatly set against the wall beneath the rack. There’s a bowl on a table next to the door, on the inside, and Richie can imagine Eddie coming home from work and dropping his keys and wallet into the bowl, taking off his jacket and shoes so he wouldn’t scuff the hardwood floors or the carpet.

Myra comes back to the door a few minutes later with a cardboard box and practically throws it at Richie. He catches it, contents rattling, although there’s a lid on the box so he can’t see what’s inside._ I thought that was why you were here,_ Myra says. She already has her hand on the doorknob, but she pauses, looking at Richie, and then says _Eddie’s obsessed with you. He watches all of your shows. But I didn’t know you two were friends._

She says the last part with a hint of malice, and then snaps _don’t come back here. I don’t want you or that stuff here again, because Eddie doesn’t want to see you,_ and then she slams the door, and Richie feels thirteen all over again. Thirteen, and nervous, and scared, and so in love, standing there and listening to Eddie argue with his mother.

But Eddie isn’t here.

Richie stands there for a minute, like a colossal dumbass, before he turns around and heads back to the car, box still in his arms. He still feels that numbness, but now with a sweeping sense of déjà vu, and just a little of that old, familiar humiliation, made new now that he is old, and tired, and completely, utterly alone.

Richie ends up at a hotel slightly less seedy than the one in DC. He’s taking his bag out of the backseat of the car when he looks at the box Myra shoved at him, and he pulls Stan’s cardigan and Eddie’s hoodie closer around him and grabs the box.

He checks in and then takes his bag and the box up to his room. Inside, he places the box on the bed, flicks on the lamp on the nightstand, and pulls his phone out of his pocket. The screen blinks up_ 22 new text messages_ and _3 missed calls,_ and Richie thinks about reading them, but then he tosses it on the bed, sits down, and drags the box closer. He flips the lid off and looks inside.

VHS tapes. Lots of them. Tapes, and DVDs in plain cases, and magazines and newspaper clippings, and what looks like a few printed online articles. Richie frowns, and then pulls one of the tapes out.

_The Comedy Den 2001 - 2003_ is written on the label in neat, round handwriting.

Richie feels something heavy drop to the pit of his stomach. He reaches in and pulls out some of the DVDs, newer dates than the VHS tapes.

_SNL August 2007. TV special 2010. Netflix releases 2014/2015. The Tonight Show June/July 2015. SNL season 34. SNL season 35._

The contents of the box are becoming jumbled, carefully stacked and ordered cases scrambling together, and Richie looks at each label with something like dread curling around his heart, heavy and cold and painful.

Each label corresponds to his recorded TV specials, his Netflix releases, every dumb comedy movie he’s ever been in, any interview he’s ever done on every late night talk show, every season of Saturday Night Live he ever wrote for or starred in. The articles are worse; printed out Wikipedia pages about him and his shows, reviews in magazines and newspapers from critics, and even that embarrassing photoshoot he’d done for Vanity Fair when it was announced that he was returning for SNL’s 37th season.

Each is carefully labeled in that same round, curly handwriting, like a 12 year old schoolgirl wrote it, and not a grown man, married and almost 40 years old.

The latest date Richie finds is in a magazine from January of that year, announcing he was going on another tour of the US. That tour had been in mid-progress until a little over a month ago, until Richie had left a show in Chicago, disappeared for a week, and then abruptly cancelled any remaining dates.

At least, that was what had come out in the news since then.

_Eddie’s obsessed with you,_ Myra had said. _He watches all of your shows._

Richie leaps off of the bed, dropping the magazine, and the next thing he knows he’s curled over the toilet, vomiting up everything he’s ever eaten in the last five years.

It burns his throat, makes him gag, and when he thinks of the box still sitting on the bed, he heaves again.

After, he sits on the floor, leaning his cheek against the cool porcelain of the sink, listening to the sound of water running from the faucet that he turned on, so that he wouldn’t have to sit in silence.

Letters, and hoodies, and cardigans, and now tapes. So many ghosts of so many things Richie never even knew he had, things Richie lost before he could ever reclaim them.

But something in Eddie hadn’t forgotten. Something in him had remained steady, clear, strong enough that he had kept track of Richie’s career for years, almost two decades, carefully saving and recording everything he could and neatly stashing it away. He hadn’t remembered Derry or any of the Losers, and yet he had been drawn to Richie. Had thought about him, often, even if it was as just some dumb comedian.

When Richie makes it out of the bathroom, he pauses, flicking the light off so just the lamp on the nightstand is on, warm and yellow and throwing harsh shadows into the dark corners of the room. He picks up the letter, which has sat on his nightstand and traveled with him everywhere since the day it first landed in his mailbox, and gently folds it in half again. He takes all of the scattered DVDs and VHS tapes and papers and puts them back in the box, neat as possible, before carefully placing the letter on top and putting the lid back on.

He doesn’t cry. He gets the vague sense that he should, or he should try to.

Instead he gets into bed, and wonders what Patty is doing now, wonders if he should call Bill back, wonders if Myra is still waiting at home, wonders what in the hell he’s going to with that box.

Richie doesn’t know the answer. Not to those questions, or any others.

As if in a dream, he pulls them both - Stan and Eddie - close, and buries his face in soft fabric, and wonders what is going to happen next. 

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t usually look for angst when the source material is brutal to begin with, but it was a little cathartic to explore some heavier themes. Title comes from [this](https://youtu.be/KXEtNknolKY) gorgeous song, definitely worth a listen.


End file.
